In 2013, Johnny B. Truant and Sean Platt published 1.5 million words and made their full-time livings as indie authors. In Write. Publish. Repeat., they tell you exactly how they did it: how they created over 15 independent franchises across 50+ published works, how they turned their art into a logical, sustainable business, and how any independent author can do the same to build a sustainable, profitable career with their writing.

Write. Publish. Repeat. explains the current self-publishing landscape and covers the truths and myths about what it means to be an indie author now and in the foreseeable future. It explains how to create books your readers will love and will want to return to again and again. Write. Publish. Repeat. details expert methods for building story worlds, characters, and plots, understanding your market (right down to your ideal reader), using the best tools possible to capture your draft, and explains proven best practices for editing. The book also discusses covers, titles, formatting, pricing, and publishing to multiple platforms, plus a bit on getting your books into print (and why that might not be a good idea!). But most importantly, Write. Publish. Repeat. details the psychology-driven marketing plan that Sean and Johnny built to shape their stories into “products” that readers couldn’t help but be drawn into — thus almost automatically generating sales — and explores ways that smart, business-minded writers can do the same to future-proof their careers.

This book is not a formula with an easy path to follow. It is a guidebook that will help you build a successful indie publishing career, no matter what type of writer you are … so long as you’re the type who’s willing to do the work.

Review:

I prefer to have my non-fiction in paperback or hardback form so I purchased the physical copy of this book. I believe it’s the first Createspace book I’ve ever seen, so that was nice. It looked like any other book, though there were the occasional formatting issue, but not enough to be a big deal.

If you like the Self-Publishing Podcast than you’ll probably like this even better. I enjoy the little rabbit holes they go down on the show, but the book cuts straight through that and gets right to what I really want to know. Tons of chapters and subchapters and they go into a fair amount of detail. They do talk about Stephen King and Scrivener a lot, but if you’ve listened to the show you should already be familiar with their fetishes.

Since I’ve listened to most of their podcast there was a lot that I was already familiar with, but since they weren’t confined to just an hour long show they got to delve in deeper. I ended up learning more than I expected. There are several areas I need to work on, particularly my mailing list.

A couple negatives or things that were a little annoying.

I found their love of Scrivener eye roll worthy, they dedicated a few pages just to that plus multiple mentions throughout, I honestly thought they should have been included in the dedication. I like Scrivener, a lot, but I use Microsoft Word and have not had the issues they have had with it.

They also tend to assume you can pump out as many words as they can. They made a point not to mention how many words that they get out at a time, but a lot of their ideas and suggestions are to write even more. When writing isn’t your full time job, and you can’t write as quickly as they can, it’s difficult to do what they suggest. I think what they recommend are really good ideas, I’ll just have to figure out how to scale them down.